Survivors
by Lux Tenebris
Summary: Six people from different backgrounds form an unlikely alliance as civilization breaks down and the dead begin to walk the earth. Please review!


_I already posted the first couple of chapters of this last year, then I forgot all about it because I started playing LOTRO. I didn't really like the direction in which the story was going either. Lots of logicial mistakes and no explanation for the zombies. I found this story again a couple of days ago, thought the first couple of paragraphs sounded really great and decided to see if I couldn't turn it into something worth reading that actually made sense._

_So here's my revised chapter 1. More are going to follow. :)_

_This is the story of a couple of people that survive the zombie apocalypse. Each chapter is told from a different person's point of view. Please let me know what you think. Even bad reviews are welcome. :)_

**Chapter 1: Julie**

I was just a girl, just a little girl when it happened, when the gates of hell opened and the dead began to walk the earth. It still pains me to think of it, to remember a time that is long past now. Isn't it strange? We had it all. The world was our playground, and there were endless opportunities waiting for us, waiting to be grasped. We had begun to conquer space. A cure for cancer was within our reach. We had achieved amazing things. And yet we were never content. We had homes, money, families, work, and yet we complained how miserable our life was, how pointless, on an almost daily basis. Man is an ungrateful creature, not realizing what he has until it is forever lost.

I was just a girl, but I remember those times with the utmost clarity. I was in second grade, a pretty little thing with long blonde pigtails. They called me cute. I was a genuinely happy child, always smiling. I could play with my toys for hours, never getting tired. I had a mother, a father, two brothers, one a young man of nineteen, the other one a teenager of sixteen. I remember playing with my friends in the park, eating ice cream, chips, popcorn. I remember the sweet taste of chocolate on my lips as if it were yesterday. I remember going to the movies, swimming in the pool in our garden. We weren't rich, but we did well enough and never had anything to worry about.

I was living on Prince Edward Island in Canada then, just outside Charlottetown. We had our own little beach. In the summer my brothers would camp in a trailer near the beach, sometimes taking me with them. I remember barbecues at sunset, jokes and games. I remember going swimming in the ocean for the first time and being scared of the jellyfish that seemed to be everywhere in the water in this part of PEI. Jellyfish are our least worry now. I remember leaving the island for the first time and visiting relatives in Halifax. I remember one amazing trip to Europe the summer when I turned seven. We went to France, and I saw the Tour Eiffel. I explored that foreign country with the curiosity that only a child possesses. It was an almost magical time.

I don't know when exactly the world began to change, whether there were signs before all hell broke lose, whether there was a starting point, a time at which it could still have been prevented. I was too young to have any interest in the news or the paper that was brought to our house every morning. My parents sheltered me, tried to protect me from the things that were going on in the world. I only knew that something was wrong when my father came home from work one evening, looking visibly distraught. He didn't hug me like he usually did, but looked at my mother and shook his head.

"Something's going on in China ..." His voice trembled as he said this. Something seemed to have shaken him to the core. "I was going home, walking past that electronics store, and there were at least two dozen people standing there, staring at the TV in the window. It was so ... unbelievable! They were killing each other, eating each other alive! They say Asia is slowly going to hell. They say it's a new 9/11, some kind of terrorist attack, the beginning of the third world war ... it's pure madness ... I never knew that people could do this to each other!"

He stopped and looked at me as if he had only noticed me now. I stared at him wide eyed. I had never seen him in so much inner turmoil. He had always been such a calm, level headed man. "Julie", he whispered. "Go to your room and play. This is nothing that children should hear."

But I refused to go. I clung to my mother, half hiding behind her and gazed at him. "Daddy, why are the people in China eating each other? Isn't that a bad thing to do?" I was naïve, I know. I had never gazed into the depths of the human soul and learned what evil we are capable of. "Yes, sweetie, it's a bad thing, but some people are bad. Their lives have made them this way. They aren't as happy as we are. They believe they can make the world a better place by killing everybody."

"Then we should feel sorry for them and make cake for them." Behind me my mother laughed bitterly, but my father nodded. "Maybe that would make it better, Julie. Maybe everything would be alright if there were more people like you." At this point he realized that he was still wearing his coat and shoes. He took them off, shaking his head as if he couldn't believe what was happening on the other side of the world. My mother quietly took his briefcase and told him that she had made him something to eat. He said he wasn't hungry. He just wanted to have something to drink and watch TV. He wanted to know how bad exactly the situation in China was even though he probably wouldn't be able to sleep at night because of it.

It was then that my younger brother Jake came down the stairs to greet our father – and stopped as he saw the look on his face. My older brother, John, was studying at the University of Newfoundland at this time. I never found out his fate. He could still be there, trying to eke out a living somewhere in Northern Canada – or have joined the army of the living dead that grows bigger and bigger every day, eating friends and enemies alive, feasting on their flesh …


End file.
